With the official release of Serenity only days away, it was time for another update. I have to thank DigitalHigh for putting so much of his time into this project. 4 months ago I just threw some concept screens into this post hoping anyone would find it the slightest bit interesting. It's amazing to open XBMC and have those concepts come to life. So thank you again Digital. Thanks also have to go out to all of the testers and translators as well as the XBMC community in general for showing so much interest in our little project. We hope Serenity lives up to all of your expectations.

I have put together screenshots of some of the sections of Serenity. I hope you all have enjoyed keeping up with this skin and the wait is almost over. Check back often because I will be adding screenshots to this post all day long.

I guess for the second picture the songs item that is selected could be left off. I was looking at it as you would select music and then the items listed in the second picture would be the new menu items, but songs should definately not be on that list.

If you select albums it would obviously list the albums then when you select a particular album that would be the list you would see. It shows off the tracks listed on a particular album. I did put these pics together rather quickly when the idea came to me.

It would take a little tweaking and thinking through all the menu changes and structure, but this is basically for a quick showoff of the concept. Details at this point would just be a waste of time since I can't program. I really do hope someone with some coding ability jumps on board with this, but I know what you mean rwparris2, it most likely will not and I'm okay with that. I just want to contribute in any way I can. Since coding isn't it, I figured I would give a few concept ideas and throw a couple pics together and hope it would materialize into a working skin. I guess only time will tell.

I think it looks great.I believe even if it don't play out,like you said,it is still contributing.I think a lot of mock-ups go no where,is not because the concept isn't used,it's because most mock-ups do not come from coders.I'm guessing a lot of small pieces of peoples ideas have been passed on.I'm also sure you will come across a few skinners who have gotten a few of their Ideas for the skins we love,from suggestions and mock-ups like this.

XML's are great...it's just having good references for what the various tags can do. Between the wiki and PM3 as an example, it's really not too difficult to do.

I was just thinking, for various screen coordinants, I have this program I used to use for Winamp skinning that can take the overall dimensions of an image in photoshop and then spit out a file with the coords for various layers in that image. So, if you want a textbox right in the middle of the screen, you put a mask layer to the position and size you want in photoshop, run it through the program, then grab the coords from the resulting xml file.

Obviously XBMC is a whole different beast, but I looked at how PMIII is comprised, and it's pretty straightforward. I'd need to focus on the multi-image tags and the multi-select text. The trickiest part would be linking it all together...the various sections in music dynamically controlling each other...

Rather you than me. my limit to skinning is simply changing the existing graphics,
I did try to rewrite a skin a while back but threw in the towel, best left to the pro's i think.
I hope it works out for you assuming you do that is...

I'm rarely too excited by mockups even when most others seem ecstatic, but I have to admit this does look nice. Would likely be very easy to skin assuming you stick with the simplistic approach you have right now.

guaranteed, this will remain very simplistic. Myself and digitalhigh are aiming for simplicity in execution. We are both relatively new to the xbmc skinning process. I have never done anything before with skinning xbmc. We are aiming for simple to code and simple design.

We want to showcase fanart. There is so much high quality fanart out there and we want to show that off. We are aiming for small menus that have a level of transparency so that fanart is still visible through the menus. Stay tuned to this thread.

I can't guarantee that this will come to life over night, but hopefully we will see these mockups or at least something similar to these mockups working in xbmc some time in the near future. Stay tuned and hopefully we can get it working soon. We hope to have the main menu working soon. Nothing else but the main menu but we are taking baby steps here. Wish us luck

It's a grid that displays on screen and allows you to easily figure out exactly what coordinates to input to locate the control where you want it. There's a 4:3 and a 720p version available, but it would be easy enough to extend it to 1080p if desired

It's a grid that displays on screen and allows you to easily figure out exactly what coordinates to input to locate the control where you want it. There's a 4:3 and a 720p version available, but it would be easy enough to extend it to 1080p if desired

Thanks for the info. I had planned on using an old program called PSD2Wal...you mock everything up in photoshop at the size you want, create seperate layers for every screen element, then save as PSD. PSD2Wal extracts the layers and then spits the coords and dimensions out into an XML file, making elements based on the name of the layer in PSD.

Regardless, I will check it out. It's never too late to learn new tricks.

And same for the empty skin. I saw mention of it, but had basically planned on just using PMIII as my example.